24

The last twenty-four hours have been packed.

The P-man and I went over to a friend's last night where he, three others and I sat on a covered and semi-enclosed deck with a propane heater that hums not unlike a brass instrument in a symphony during the pre-show warm up when you light it. We talked about our week and what we'd each done and played music on guitars while others sang along. Winner of the harrowing tale of the night category went to E who had to change his number after a girl he picked up at a wedding went psychotic on him and started endlessly stalking him and telling him untruths like "I'm pregnant.." holy restraining-order-in-the-making. E also took some great pics, which I hope to have soon as well.

We got home and I was in bed by 1 or 2 or so, and I proceeded to sleep in until noon. I love sleeping through the morning. I've been able to sleep in at least a bit pretty much all week as P hasn't had school this week. He's back tomorrow though, so my sleep hours diminish back to the usual.

When I got up P was playing a video game and I suggested we make pancakes. I got out a recipe and all the ingredients and P made the batter while I washed the last night's dishes. I cooked them in a frying pan to a nice golden hue and we ate them with maple syrup.

I cleaned up the house a bit, had a shower and then hit the email. About an hour later I came across the request by the PolicyKit-kde developers to sneak their code in without going through kdereview. The release team reps were against breaking the norms, Kevin was against anything related to a framework going in so late and Lubos wasn't impressed because about a month ago it wasn't working at all. PolicyKit-kde is two small apps that give the user a GUI to interact with PolicyKit, which is used to do things that require special user priveleges in a way that allows a great amount of sys admin control. Think of it as a sudo for GUIs that uses D-Bus.

The fellow who designed and wrote a lot of it is a GNOME developer, but he designed it to be desktop agnostic. I take my hat of to David Zeuthen for that, but we in KDE haven't really taken advantage of that feature. So anytime you want to use PolicyKit and it requires user interaction via a GUI ... you need more than just KDE around. For desktop basics like this, there's really no excuse, especially since PackageKit-kde is only about 1400 lines of code. Due to this, and that it apparently works decently now, I'm hoping it will go into 4.2. This will also allow KDE app developers to more comfortable start working on PolicyKit integration where it makes sense (e.g. in System Settings).

If it doesn't make it into 4.2 it will be in 4.3, but please make sure that your distro packages it with their KDE build before then! I went over the code a bit myself today and wrote up a lengthy summary email about the matter to kde-core-devel. It's in the hands of the release team now.

After that I made dinner and the P-man and I tucked into a simple pasta and salad affair. Hunger once again addressed, I folded a load of laundry and put P into a bath so he'd be clean and fresh for school in the morning. As he soaked and played, I worked on adding per-virtual-desktop-views for Plasma.

I committed the feature to svn just a while ago and it does work. There are some quirks and some issues it highlights, but nothing bigger than what we've worked through before so I'm not overly worried. It will be an experimental feature in 4.2, which means no GUI. If you want to try it out, put perVirtualDesktopViews=true in your plasmarc in the [General] section. I'm not overly interested in bug reports at this time on it, however. I have other issues to fry.

For instance, I rearranged how screen addition, removal and changes are managed inside the Plasma desktop shell. We now have Kephal for that which should address many of the issues we were having by relying only on QDesktopWidget and how xrandr 1.2 loves to be useless for a desktop application. Kephal provides a rather decent API for managing screens and promises to bring sanity to it all. Both KWin and Plasma will be using it in 4.2.

I also want to attack some zooming issues in the next two months to make it more streamlined and easier to use. There are also some quirks with the new drag-and-place-where-you-want-it cashew.

So, lots to do. =)

But tonight I'm done. It's half past 11 and I just finished folding the second, and thankfully last, load of laundry for the night. The alarm is set for 06:45, so I should be heading to bed within the next hour or two. First, however, I thought I'd blog .. and then I'm going to call a good friend and talk for a while. =)